"Ode To The Writer"

I want to be a morning person, not a mourning person. Not anymore. I will mourn for about an hour, early, each morning for the night that passed by my window and I didn’t see. Not like the old days, with another glass in my hand, infatuated again by the night, expecting answers. And mornings here are bleak anyway.

I will see people going to work in the cold and I will feel good about myself, by the fire. I will sip hot coffee instead of cold gin and the eyelids won’t protest. I will trade Coltrane for early Beatles and the world will seem to lose some shadow, at least for a little while.

For a little while, I will deceive myself into believing that not everything is lost, and maybe as long as that lasts I can write fluently about what is lost without mourning it. I will stop smoking, for it is the ultimate mourning mechanism, my fingers mechanically rolling and lighting and accepting the cigarette as the extension of my hand that was missing for thirteen odd years. I will stop mourning my lungs, for a little while.

I will write about you, because there is nothing else worth writing about. I will write about the space I never found, like bacon in a veggie burger. The sweet indulgence you never paid, but for a little while. I will trade my denim jacket for a tweed one and I will write about all the truths you denied and made me believe.

I will trade my computer for a typewriter so I will feel the ink on the page as I write about the people we all were thirteen years ago, how I believed they are still within us, for a little while. The cold sunshine will fight against my curtains and it will win. The winter wind will blow in through the slightly open window and carry the smell of snow and pine cones to my nostrils. The sweater and the coffee will keep my body warm and my mind will start to work with each word. Children will draw chalk penguins on the trees outside, my fingers will bleed on the keys, the hair will get in my face and I will think I can go on. For a little while.